Bashar al-Assad visits an electricity station in Damascus. Significant defections from the Alawite hard core of the army and security forces are still absent. Photograph: Sana Handout/EPA

It is one of the enduring features of the Syrian crisis that Bashar al-Assad has proved far more resilient than many imagined. Journalists and commentators have spent the past two years negotiating a landscape strewn with propaganda, illusions and substantial doses of wishful thinking, finally to grasp that he has real staying power.

The president still has loyal, powerful allies, as Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, made clear on Tuesday. Lebanon's Shia militia, he pledged, would stand by its fellow stalwart of the "axis of resistance". Russia and Iran – "real friends" – would not let Assad fall.

Syria illustrates a sort of Middle Eastern Murphy's law – anything that can make things worse invariably happens: massacres, refugees fleeing to Jordan, tensions in Lebanon and Iraq, the use of chemical weapons, the risk of conflict with Israel. Most days see scores or more dead so that a revision of the UN's estimate of 70,000 fatalities seems long overdue. Diplomacy is non-existent. No one believes in a negotiated solution. Syria is being destroyed.

It would be wrong to describe the mood in Damascus as upbeat – it is a tense and frightened city that resounds constantly to the noise of war. But there is a sense in Syrian government circles that their arguments are starting to hit home.

Assad insisted from the start that he faced not a popular uprising for democracy and freedom – the template of the early days of the Arab spring – but "armed terrorist gangs" financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and supposedly allied with the US, Turkey and Israel.

Like all successful propaganda, some parts of this pitch were true, others blatantly false. Arab enmity is real enough. But the Islamist character of the uprising has been exaggerated. The US has done little more than co-ordinate arms deliveries by the Gulf states – with Barack Obama stamping on more proactive proposals by the CIA and Pentagon.

The fact that Syria's fractured opposition is so scathing about Washington has barely dented the grand conspiracy theory. Israel preferred the devil it knew in Damascus – and a Golan front that had been peaceful for 40 years – to the uncertainties of post-Assad chaos. Weapons supplied to Hezbollah by Iran are far superior to anything yet given to the Syrian rebels.

Now Assad says that the enemy is al-Qaida and that Syria and the west should be on the same side. There is certainly alarm as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) loses ground to the jihadi Jabhat al-Nusra. Thus the vetting of FSA men being trained in Jordan to fight on a new "southern front" centred on Daraa. But Jordan frets too about Syrian threats and the risk of blowback.

Following the flurry over chemical weapons, leaving the impression that US "red lines" can be surprisingly flexible, the latest signal from Washington is that Obama is considering "lethal" aid to the rebels if Russia fails to change tack and pressure Assad. Opposition expectations of the US, however, remain low.

Foreign friends apart, regime resilience is still part of the big picture. Military gains have been made in counter-attacks near Idlib and Damascus and rebel supply lines hit hard. Academic Thomas Pierret emphasises the "kin-based/sectarian character of the military" and the absence, still, of significant defections from the Alawite hard core of the army and security forces.

Syrians point out that the Assad family prepared for this crisis for decades, internally and externally. The president and his men talk of fighting to save the country and of elections in May 2014: that's another fearful year away with little prospect of immediate change and a reasonable expectation of still worse yet to come.